View source for Lifeworlds 3rd draft

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<h1>Lifeworlds</h1>

<div class="outbox" style="max-width:400px; margin: 1px auto 1px auto;"><div class="inbox compact">Please note: As a concept, <i>Lifeworlds</i> has great importance for the design and development of {{apts}}. We need to put the project in motion, however, in order to work out the modes of interaction between actual persons living and working in different lifeworlds and the resources accessible to them through {{apts}}. This process of emergent design may result in significant changes in the structure and function of {{apts}}.</div></div>

<p><i>Lifeworlds</i> have great significance in a place to study. Lifeworlds mediate the who-what-how-where/when-and-why in studying. Let's consider the fit that lifeworlds have in a place to study carefully for it forms and shapes what can and should happen in the course of study.</p>

<p>Consider a statement that most every parent will have spoken when their child reaches 6 or so, "Come September Samantha begins school." This statement signals a major change in Samantha's life experience, and that of her parents, and the outward features of much of it are givens, for the school becomes not only a major feature in the lifeworld of every pupil, but a largely predictable one, for "school" signifies a well-worked out, thoroughly established program that each will follow with limited variations. A deeply distinctive feature of digital communications, a powerful affordance if we can make it work, arises with the way it provides access to cultural resources without encasing it in predetermined, given programs for their use. {{apts}} seeks to make this feature work.</p>

<p>{{apts}} does not itself constitute a lifeworld.<ref>Of course, those who devote a considerable portion of their lives and work to creating and maintaining {{apts}} will say that that is a big part of their lifeworlds, but that will condition and enable the uses of {{apts}} but not form a program for their use.</ref> One does not go to it as one does to a school, college, or university. Persons will interact with {{apts}}, preoccupied with the flux of experience that constitutes their lives. This solves a significant educational problem and gives rise to another.</p>

<p>Educational institutions as we know them almost invariably offer programs of instruction that aspirants seek to follow. These programs have embedded in them lifeworld assumptions that in myriad ways can lead to disjunctions with the lifeworlds of those trying to follow the programs. Wasted talent and effort result.
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<!--<p>Let's start with the problem as we encounter it here on {{apts}}. That suggestion should seem strange, unexpected — we encounter many problems, here and elsewhere. What's with <u><b>THE</b></u> problem? What's with the one that we especially encounter here on {{apts}}? We have a huge site. We can move around it by activating powerful questions — who?, what?, how?, where/when?, why?. We have an expanse of tools, vast collections of cultural resources, and a variety of initial procedures. We even have a slogan — <u>To begin, begin!</u> — and we've begun, we tell ourselves. So what's the problem? And what's so special about how we encounter it here on {{apts}}?</p>

<p>Ok, THE problem arises because we actually do not want to do what most people will really expect will be done here. We've unpacked our mission statement — {{apts}} provides free, unencumbered, comprehensive resources to persons seeking self-formation and liberal learning in the digital commons. We introduced what it means to study and why we need a place to do in. We've indicated what {{apts}} is not and given an overview of its affordances.... Then what? That's THE problem, and it's a bit special here.</p> 

</p> ??? Our first response may well involve our pointing out they we've shown up in this place of yours.... "Hey, you tell me what you now expect me to do! I applied, you admitted me, I've showed up ready to get with the program. Show it to me. What's next?" If you enroll in a school or university, sign up for a training program, get put in boot camp, or join a reading group, that's a reasonable expectation. But it's not here on {{apts}}, and that's the problem.</p>

<p>How can we set the agenda of study? Who should do it? Where and when will we pursue it? What should it include and exclude? Why should it be this way and not that? Of course, we all answer that we can and should do all that as persons and as groups, for ourselves as we see fit. That's plain as day.... Except that we see we can quickly become alienated from many things we might have set as an agenda for ourselves as persons and as groups. Before long, our second thoughts may declare our initial enthusiasm to have been an infeasible, boring, useless agenda. Or once institutionalized and organized, we may find the programs we set for ourselves somehow became programs that others are setting for us, doing it all wrong to boot. We need to think carefully about the problem, creatively; we need to study it, as we say.</p>

<p>Let's start by with a story that one of the founders of modern thought told about how he went about setting his agenda of study.-->